Thursday, 17 October 2013

The silent killer

It is a silent killer and it
kills as many people as do HIV/AIDS. In India alone, more than 2.5 lakhs
people die annually because of this but the Government is yet to come forward
with a policy to tackle this dreaded illness.

Sadly, one person in twelve
is affected by this in the world. Yet, many nations have neglected it and they
have treated it casually despite growing numbers of people succumbing to it.

In India, more than 500 million people
are affected by the illness. Strangely, neither the Government nor the State
medical machinery seems to be seized of the matter. What is more worrying is
that there is no movement the lines of anti-AIDS and anti-HIV programmes or
campaigns to tackle this dreaded illness.

This illness is hepatitis and
more and more people are falling prey to it. Though the World Health
Organisation (WHO) has declared a day in July as World Hepatitis Day, awareness
of this illness is meagre among victims and their nonchalance appalling.

Hepatitis is irritation,
swelling or deformity of the liver.

Generally, people associate
hepatitis with viral infection. What they fail to realise is that there are
different varieties of infection and though they are all generally classified
under hepatitis, they are not all similar or related.

The most common causes of
viral hepatitis are the five unrelated hepatotropic viruses hepatitis A,
B, C, D, and E. Yes, the most common cause of hepatitis is viral but the
inflammation of lover can also lead to several other illness such as Yellow
fever, Herpes Simplex.

Hepatitis can be acute (here,
the inflammation of the liver is for less than six months) or chronic (inflammation
lasts more than six months). This can be caused by hepatitis viruses, including
A, B, C, D, and E or even other lesser known viruses.

Today, a major cause for
hepatitis in India
is due to alcohol and drug consumption. The third leading factor is due to the
presence of highly dangerous toxins in the environment.

AA little more than 500
million people in India are
living with chronic viral hepatitis in India, and a majority of them are
affected by B and C virus which is the common cause of liver cirrhosis and
cancer. Hepatitis A and E are typically caused by ingestion of
contaminated food or water and there have been reports of such cases in Bangalore.

In India, Hepatitis B, C and D generally
occur due to contact with infected body fluids. Though approximately 3.5 lakhs people
die annually from hepatitis C-related liver diseases, 70 per cent and above of
people show no initial symptoms. By the time, it is diagnosed, it is invariably
late.

Studies by medical
institutions and organizations have tabulated that at least 20 million Indians
carry hepatitis B virus and 8 million to ten million carry Hepatitis C virus.
Shocking though, the Government does not seem to be too much bothered about
these statistics.

The WHO itself has noted that
there is no routine surveillance and also that deaths due to the virus are neither
reported to a central registry nor recorded with a agency. Therefore, exact
statistics about the deaths due to the illness is not completely accurate.

Hepatitis can be prevented but
what is shocking is that the number
of deaths due to this illness has been
going up since 1990. There was 986000 deaths in 1990 and now the figure is an astounding
1.4 million. This matches the number of people killed by AIDS every year.

More than 70 per cent f the
worldwide deaths due to hepatitis occurs in the Asia Pacific region. This
translates to a million people dying in this region and on average one person dying
every 30 seconds.

Studies have shown that 65
per cent of people in Asia live with chronic
hepatitis B and 75 per cent with hepatitis C, but a majority of these are unaware
of the infection. In India,
the most common reason for many hepatitis outbreaks are generally associated
with fecal contamination of drinking water.

The earliest hepatitis outbreak
attributed to HEV was the 1955 waterborne outbreak in Delhi which affected 29,000 people. The
reason: contamination of city’s drinking water by raw sewage. India apart from Pakistan,
China, Nepal and Myanmar regularly report hepatitis
E outbreak. In India, E was first recognized when it appeared in Kashmir in 1978.

Approximately, four in 100
Indians are infected with Hepatitis B and one in 100 with Hepatitis C virus. Studies
have shown that 40 million people in India are infected by hepatitis B
and blood donors are more prone to contact this illness.

Allopathy or the modern system of medicine labels it calls it degenerative and often fatal disorder. It says there is no known effective ...

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